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Table of contents

• Balance in Spiritual Experience: "Crisis" vs "Process"
• Christian response to Crisis - Understanding Theology
• You are here
• Recommended

To abstract a text from its context and to interpret it in the abstract is to distort the meaning of God's Word. Moreover the context here is not only the chapters and verses that precede and succeed this particular text nor is it even limited to the total context of the Bible. The context includes also the circumstances in which Paul's statement was made. Paul was writing to a particular Christian community in Rome, a community that had its own particular problems in relation to the State at that time and in those circumstances.

That is part of the context of our text.

Many authors have drawn attention to the fact that in the rest of the Bible God does not demand obedience to oppressive rulers. Examples can be given ranging from Pharaoh to Pilate and through into Apostolic times. The Jews and later the Christians did not believe that their imperial overlords, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Greeks or the Romans, had some kind of divine right to rule them and oppress them. These empires were the beasts described in the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelations.

God allowed them to rule for a while but he did not approve of what they did.

It was not God's will. His will was the freedom and liberation of Israel.

Rom cannot be contradicting all of this. But most revealing of all is the circumstances of the Roman Christians to whom Paul was writing. They were not revolutionaries. They were not trying to overthrow the State. They were not calling for a change of government. They were, what has been called, 'antinomians' or 'enthusiasts' and their belief was that Christians, and only Christians, were exonerated from obeying any State at all, any government or political authority at all, because Jesus alone was their Lord and King.

This is of course heretical and Paul is compelled to point out to these Christians that before the second coming of Christ there will always be some kind of State, some kind of secular government and that Christians are not exonerated from subjection to some kind of political authority. Paul is simply not addressing the issue of a just or unjust State or the need to change one government for another. He is simply establishing the fact that there will be some kind of secular authority and that Christians as such are not exonerated from subjection to secular laws and authorities.

He does not say anything at all about what they should do when the State becomes unjust and oppressive. That is another question. Consequently those who try to find answers to the very different questions and problems of our time in the text of Rom are doing a great disservice to Paul. The use that 'State Theology' makes of this text tells us more about the political options of 'those who construct this theology than it does about the meaning of God's Word in this text.

As one biblical scholar puts it: "The primary concern is to justify the interests of the State and the text is pressed into its service without respect for the context and the intention of Paul. If we wish to search the Bible for guidance in a situation where the State that is supposed to be "the servant of God" Romans betrays that calling and begins to serve Satan instead, then we can study chapter 13 of the Book of Revelations.

Here the Roman State becomes the servant of the dragon the devil and takes on the appearance of a horrible beast. Its days are numbered because God will not permit his unfaithful servant to reign forever. The State makes use of the concept of law and order to maintain the status quo which it depicts as 'normal. Anyone who wishes to change this law and this order is made to feel that they are lawless and disorderly. In other words they are made to feel guilty of sin. It is indeed the duty of the State to maintain law and order, but it has not divine mandate to maintain any kind of law and order.

Something does not become moral and just simply because the State has declared it to be a law and the organization of a society is not a just and right order simply because it has been instituted by the State. We cannot accept any kind of law and any kind of order. The concern of Christians is that we should have in our country a just law and a right order. In the present crisis and especially during the State of Emergency, 'State Theology' has tried to re-establish the status quo of orderly discrimination, exploitation and oppression by appealing to the consciences of its citizens in the name of law and order.

It tries to make those who reject this law and this order feel that they are ungodly. The State here is not only usurping the right of the Church to make judgments about what would be right and just in our circumstances; it is going even further than that and demanding of us, in the name of law and order, an obedience that must be reserved for God alone. The South African State recognizes no authority beyond itself and therefore it will not allow anyone to question what it has chosen to define as 'law and order.

We all know how the South African State makes use of the label 'communist. No thought is given to Why some people have indeed opted for communism or for some form of socialism. Even people who have not rejected capitalism are called 'communists' when they reject 'State Theology.

It must be able to symbolize what it regards as godless behavior and what ideas must be regarded as atheistic. It must have its own version of hell. And so it has invented, or rather taken over, the myth of communism.

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All evil is communistic and all communist or socialist ideas are atheistic and godless. Threats about hell-fire and eternal damnation are replaced by threats and warnings about the horrors of a tyrannical, totalitarian, atheistic and terrorist communist regime--a kind of hell-on-earth.

This is a very convenient way of frightening some people into accepting any kind of domination and exploitation by a capitalist minority. The South African State has its own heretical theology and according to that theology millions of Christians in South Africa not to mention the rest of the world are to be regarded as 'atheists.

The State in its oppression of the people makes use again and again of the name of God. Military chaplains use it to encourage the South African Defence Force , police chaplains use it to strengthen policemen and cabinet ministers use it in their propaganda speeches. But perhaps the most revealing of all is the blasphemous use of God's holy name in the preamble to the new apartheid constitution. In humble submission to Almighty God, who controls the destinies of nations and the history of peoples; who gathered our forebears together from many lands and gave them this their own; who has guided them from generation to generation; who has wondrously delivered them from the dangers that beset them.

This god is an idol.

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It is as mischievous, sinister and evil as any of the idols that the prophets of Israel had to contend with. Here we have a god who is historically on the side of the white settlers, who dispossesses black people of their land and who gives the major part of the land to his "chosen people. It is the god of superior weapons who conquered those who were armed with nothing but spears. It is the god of the casspirs and hippos, the god of teargas, rubber bullets, sjamboks, prison cells and death sentences. Here is a god who exalts the proud and humbles the poor--the very opposite of the God of the Bible who "scatters the proud of heart, pulls down the mighty from their thrones and exalts the humble" Lk From a theological point of view the opposite of the God of the Bible is the devil, Satan.

The god of the South African State is not merely an idol or false god, it is the devil disguised as Almighty God--the antichrist. The oppressive South African regime will always be particularly abhorrent to Christians precisely because it makes use of Christianity to justify its evil ways. As Christians we simply cannot tolerate this blasphemous use of God's name and God's Word. Christians who are trying to remain faithful to the God of the Bible are even more horrified when they see that there are Churches, like the White Dutch Reformed Churches and other groups of Christians, who actually subscribe to this heretical theology.

What is particularly tragic for a Christian is to see the number of people who are fooled and confused by these false prophets and their heretical theology. We have analyzed the statements that are made from time-to-time by the so-called 'English-speaking' Churches. We have looked at what Church leaders tend to say in their speeches and press statements about the apartheid regime and the present crisis. What we found running through all these pronouncements is a series of inter-related theological assumptions.

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These we have chosen to call 'Church Theology. Nevertheless the opinions expressed by Church leaders are regarded in the media and generally in our society as the official opinions of the Churches. We have therefore chosen to call these opinions 'Church Theology. In a limited, guarded and cautious way this theology is critical of apartheid.